Digital Technology: Trinary – 3 State

The evolution of numerical digitalness began with a two state “switch”, a path to which technological progress developed binary into what we have today and one that now governs our lives in many ways. In a “machine domain” binary is expressed as either a “0=off” or a “1=on” towards a total numeric value (eg 11111110 =254) but while this be ideal for numeric purposes it offers no means by which “maybe’s” or “uncertainty” be handled or stored with respect to human intelligence which now drives our “Zero Tolerance” World where absolute responses be required to zero or one.

Unlike binary having a base of two Trinary has a base of three but needing three states in order to fascilitate numeric progression. While eight bit Binary gives 11111111=255 eight bit Trinary gives 3,280 (a 12.86 increase over binary). Sixteen bits gives 65,535 Binary but 21,523,360 Trinary (a 328.4 increase over binary) by switching between three states. Although “more into less” may benefit data transfer rates an “indecision state” could be of major importance towards tomorrows Artificail Intelligence (AI) to which “uncertainty” be a key to discovery in differentiating whether something be true or false. To new learning based upon prior learning “past links” may have to be vetted to reflect change in either being still “false”, “true” or switched to “now questionable/uncertain” – all of this being a neccessity to understandingness and intellectual progress as oppose to our current Zero-Tolerance domain to which people are made to fit into memory storage device catagories or absoluteness as to yes/no on partial data that ignores people circumstances.

P J Dale BSc